


The Beggar's Wish

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Tipping the Velvet - Sarah Waters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-12-21
Updated: 2005-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:29:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,338
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1636508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By Christmas I was threatening to tie her to the bedposts; when I said that she looked at me over the spectacles she wore for book-work, and her arch smile made me quiver.<br/></p>
            </blockquote>





	The Beggar's Wish

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Mme Bahorel

 

 

Christmas was, Annie declared with contented sighs and hands clasped above her breast, the most perfect time of year to be in love, didn't we agree?

"I recall you said the same about spring," I said, and Florence was distracted from her Guild work long enough to put in her ha'penn'orth; she vouched that in July Annie had declared summer to be the true season of lovers, and added that she was sure our friend would think a wet Sunday afternoon in February the most romantic day of the year, provided she could spend it spooning with Emma Raymond.

"You are the most cynical pair of toms I ever met," said Annie, sounding not in the least put out, as she collected her coat and primped her scarf around her - the better for her Emma to unwind it from her, I had no doubt - "and it's a good thing that you're so besotted with one another," she added as she tripped out the door, "as no sensible woman would have you."

I thought to myself that all women, sensible, insensible, and bound for Bedlam alike, would object to their sweetheart working so hard for the Guild that her concession to the season was to sometimes look up at the sprig of mistletoe above the hearth and frown, as though wondering why bits of greenery were appearing in her parlour. If Florence was busy from January to November, then she tripled her efforts at the year's end. She wrote enough letters, it seemed, to keep half of London's postmen hard at work, and for the whole month of December I never saw her sit down to a meal, or stay in the house for more than half an hour when she wasn't asleep. By Christmas I was threatening to tie her to the bedposts; when I said that she looked at me over the spectacles she wore for book-work, and her arch smile made me quiver.

Christmas Day itself we spent, as we had the year before, doling out goose and beef broth at Freemantle House, while Cyril ran between the tables and was petted and fussed over by Florence's girls. Her girls; they all loved her, of course, but in some of them it ran deeper - some whose gaze lingered on her hair, or who pinked when she called them by name, and I thought of the girls who once begged for my autograph outside stage doors with just that hungry, yearning look in their eyes.

They all loved Florence, but it was only me who caught her by the waist in the corner of the empty kitchen, only me who pressed my fingers against her dress at the fork of her thighs and kissed her breathless. I was exhausted and my arms ached from hauling pots and tureens and my hands were raw from scrubbing pans; but at that moment I wouldn't have exchanged my lot for the Queen's.

**

One of Florence's patronesses at the Guild, a Lady something-or-other, had given her tickets to the pantomime at the Royal - "For yourself and your husband and your darling little boy". I had never met this lady, but when Florence described how she had given this gift I could picture her; she'd be one of Diana Letheby's lot, fixed in a grand house in St. John's Wood, with fine charitable works in public and, at home, a pretty girl or two to fuck upon the stairs and show off on her arm at the Cavendish Club. How she must have licked her lips, the old cat, when Florence said she had no husband!

Florence was hardly able to refuse the gift - the patroness might have taken offence, and found some other favourite charity the next year - but she insisted she would be far too busy to go to the performance, which was to be the opening night, on Boxing Day. I should go, she said, along with Cyril and Ralph's wife. I protested that her sister should have the treat, and I would stay to help with her visits to the poor - but I didn't make my case terribly hard, as I dearly wanted to see the pantomime. Years before - whole lifetimes ago, it seemed now - I had been Second Boy in Cinderella at the Brit, playing Dandini to Kitty's Prince Casimir. I had thought, then, and still did, that paradise must be something like a pantomime in a really grand theatre, shining and spectacular, smelling of greasepaint and gas-light.

Kitty had vanished from my imagined paradise, slipped out the stage door to be replaced with Florence and Cyril, Ralph and his wife, Annie and Emma and our other friends; but I was curious whether the show would be as grand as I imagined; whether, from the front of the stage, what had seemed magical and unearthly might be rather ordinary after all. Florence must have guessed this, at least in part, for she insisted she could spare me for the evening, and that Cyril would not be content with anyone but me to take him to the theatre. It was settled, then. The three of us would go to Aladdin, the day after Christmas.

Ralph had been married a little under four months, to the widowed sister of Annie's love, Emma. I loved her, at first, because Ralph loved her - no-one could have witnessed him sweating before us in the parlour at Quilter Street, red in the face as a guardsman's tunic as he stammered that Mrs. Costello had consented to be his wife, and doubted that this was the happiest man to be found in London, perhaps the whole of the world - and then, when I had offered my congratulations she seized my hand in both hers and said, "But you must call me Mary! After all, we are to be sisters-in-law", and I loved her fiercely for her own self. I would have been content to see Aladdin in Mary's company, but on Christmas Eve she took to her bed with a fever - a mild one, though to hear Ralph fuss you would have thought she had come down with cholera and typhus all together.

That might have been the end of the outing, or Cyril and I might have gone alone, but I think Ralph or Mary spoke to Florence, for she suddenly found herself not so busy after all. "Do you really mean it?" I asked, delighted at this unexpected present; "Are you sure you can be spared?"

"Boxing Night's not so busy as the week before Christmas," she said, leaving her papers and her spectacles aside. "Besides, I've heard the girls at the Boy sigh over your days on the stage, and I'd like to find out what the fuss is about; I'm quite keen for some pretty young masher to wink at me from the stage, and throw me a chocolate sovereign."

"Oh, are you?" I cried, and lifted Cyril from the carpet, balancing him against my hip. "Your wanton mother," I told him, "is planning on running away with a girl togged up in boys' clothes, all for the sake of a gold-wrapped coin, what do you say to that?"

Cyril blinked at me and sucked on his fingers and said nothing at all. He was too young to understand where he was being taken, only that this was some wonderful treat, and on the night of the show he babbled excitedly to himself as I dressed him in his best frock and combed his hair - how the girls at Freemantle had exlaimed over those curls! Dressing myself was a far quicker matter. I could hardly wear my moleskins to Drury Lane, and I felt quite strange as I fastened the frock I had borrowed from Mary - my own dresses being only suited for summer, and only then for a summer when it was suitable to wear rags.

"You do look fine," Florence said when we were ready; how wonderful love was, I marvelled, feeling as I imagined Annie must when she sighted Emma's face in a rosebush or some other fanciful thing. The dress was meant for someone of a very different shape and I looked quite dreadful, but Florence's eyes shone when she looked at me, and I might have been clad in silks and spun gold.

She was wearing the damson skirt that brought out the blush of her cheek and the red in her hair; if anybody on that street looked fine, it was her. "A nice couple of swells we make," I said, offering her my arm like a gent taking his lady on the town, "would you do me the honour, madam?"

**

It was, as I have said, my idea of paradise. Years away from the theatre, in the backstreets where I had rented and the fine house where I had danced to Diana's tune, had not changed for me the delight I felt when I walked through the doors. There was the red velvet curtain, heavy and mysterious over the stage; I caught the scent of pony-hair, and if I listened I thought I could hear, over the hubbub of the audience, the stagehands whistling their cues.

Cyril, I saw at once, was awestruck. He barely moved once in the whole night - and this was in the days when a good pantomime might be four or five hours - and all that time his eyes were fixed on the stage, round as carriage wheels. I had thought Florence might be harder to please, and as we had neared the theatre my heart quickened in my chest almost to pain; if only she doesn't despise it! I thought. It was a sudden, terrible notion, that Florence might be bored - worse, that she might laugh, and wonder at what I child I was that I thought this was Heaven.

I had worried for naught. As we took her seats she whispered to me, "Ain't it grand; oh, Nance, ain't it grand!" When the curtain began to rise she clutched at my sleeve; when the villainous sorceror Abanazar appeared on the stage with a clash of symbols and a puff of smoke, she jumped; when the magic carpet twitched at the corners and floated into the air she looked as bewitched as Cyril.

I knew how it was all done, with wires and mirrors and trapdoors, and so I watched the players instead of marvelling at the magic. The Principal Boy was a handsome girl with her dark hair done up in a Chinaman's pigtails; 'his' Princess Balroubador had a tiny waist and a voice like music. When they kissed, at the story's happy ending, Florence's fingers brushed the inside of my wrist, and then she was applauding so hard I was sure she would take the skin from her palms.

We walked slowly home in the chill air, Cyril between us and swinging on our hands so he was more often flying over the cobbles than walking on them. Florence talked endlessly of the scene in the cave of jewels, and her terror at the first sight of the Slave of the Ring - "But how can mirrors make a person appear out of the air? And make him so frightening, and so tall?" - and she pulled her scarf across her nose and mouth like a veil and asked, did we think she would make a beautiful Eastern lady?

"I never heard of a girl from China with hair like yours, nor skin neither," I said, although the Principal Girl had had hair redder than Florence's. "You shall have to content yourself with being the prettiest girl in London, and leave the East to its own beauties."

If we had been in our own parlour, or even on our own street, instead of a long and poorly-lit road with a couple ofjossers giving us the eye, I think the compliment would have bought me a kiss. Instead she swept Cyril up into her arms and called him her little prince,and over the top of his head she gave me a look that promised plenty of kisses when we got ourselves home.

**

The house, empty all night, was as icy inside as out. "Cyril is ruined forever," said Florence, sinking bonelessly beside me in the chair. Her breath warmed my cheek more than the embers of the fire. "He fell asleep still singing to himself. I think he's dancing in his dreams. We will have to watch him at all times, or he will be run away with the circus."

"And you with such hopes that he would be a great socialist," I said; "Well, since there's nothing for it, I shall teach him to sing Knocked 'Em in the Old Kent Road sweet enough to make the angels weep, and between numbers he can throw pamphlets to the crowd and beseech them to join their unions."

Flo called me wicked and a tease, and the way she squirmed against my side and pressed cold fingers under my collar showed only that she was both things herself. "It was wonderful, though," she said. "Didn't you think tonight was wonderful?"

I was cosy in my own house with the people I loved best; I had the most perfect girl I had ever known curled at my side and pressing kisses to my neck, and she loved me, she loved me.

"Wonderful," I said, turning to kiss her; "I won't half feel more like myself when I'm out of this dress, though."

My Florence, all innocence, suggested she might help with that.

**

The sheets were clammy with cold. My skin raised up in goosepimples as I slid naked beneath the counterpane, and then Florence joined me, fitting her body over mine, and I forgot to be chilled.

For the longest time she did nothing but kiss me; hardly chaste, but I strained for her to touch me, and had to set my teeth against a gron of frustration that would have woken Cyril; another minute and I would have been frigging myself against her hip like an animal in my desperation for her. She lowered her mouth to my nipple, then, and the caress of her tongue and the gentle tease of teeth almost sent me over some precipice.

And all the time the ache between my thighs made me want to scream and clutch at her hair, demand she touch me, but she kept her mouth and hands at my breasts, teasing and tormenting me. If my nails had not been clipped short, I believe she would have awoken the next day to find her back clawed to pieces from my clutching.

When finally - slowly, maddeningly slowly! - she slid a single finger inside me, then joined it with another, and a third, she whispered close at my ear, "Is this what you're so eager for, Nance? Is this what you want?"

Yes, I wanted to shout, yes! You are everything that I want, and I would do anything, go to the end of the world for you, only keep touching me for all time. Perhaps I did shout it. Perhaps I cried out, as I came, and she had to muffle it with her mouth; all I was aware of was that she was kissing me, and whispering to me, and as far as I was concerned this could continue forever.

**

We dozed, but didn't quite sleep. We had never blown out the candles at the side of the bed and now they were almost melted away, save for guttering wicks in pools of wax. Florence was warm beside me, her hair splayed over the pillow and her face turned to the hollow of my throat, and every so often she would kiss me, as if to remind herself I was there.

Half asleep and half awake, I slipped into dreams; of Kitty, striding across the stage in her Prince's costume, Kitty in our Stamford Hill house, kissing me in darkness and silence; of Diana, smoking one of her red-tipped cigarettes and telling me the story of the beggar and the djinn.

Perhaps the pantomime had made me think of it. The stories were similar, but not the same; Diana's beggar had been Persian, so she had said, and Aladdin was from China, but for all I knew the East was overrun with djinn, their lamps and bottles strewn about the place like fish-heads in the Billingsgate gutters. This genie had offered the beggar seven hundred days of pleasure - the love of a princess, a palace to live in, and every luxury he could desire - or seventy years of ordinary comfort.

Diana had acted the djinn, then, and I had chosen the pleasure. No-one had told me, and I had not thought it for myself, that ordinary comfort - lying warm in a bed with the woman I loved - was the greater prize. I might have laughed bitterly, back then, at the idea.

I turned, tightening my arms about Florence's waist, and the dream turned to mermaids...

Miss Mermaid, Kitty had once called me, as she raised my hand to her lips and caught there the scent of brine and osyter juice; and perhaps I had been a mermaid in those days, bewitched by her, leaving behind the sea for her sake, carelessly splitting my tail to legs so I might walk with her and have her love me, a little. It seemed very long ago, and I was no mermaid now - and a good thing, too, as Florence would have little use for such a creature. She would have to keep me in the bathtub, I thought whimsically, and she would complain that I couldn't run her Guild errands with a fishy tail instead of legs; and as for what we had been doing only an hour before, it would be powerfully difficult!

"What are you laughing about?" she murmured, and I awoke from my doze. She had her eyes closed and her mouth set in a line; she looked as grim and grand as the picture of Eleanor Marx that hung in the parlour, though I doubt that lady ever squealed as her sweetheart suddenly pinched the inside of her thigh, or stifled herself to giggles for fear of waking the sleeping child next door. "We will wake the whole street!" she whispered, sounding as if this was not such a terrible idea; rather, quite a saucy one.

"We will," I said, feeling suddenly quite giddy. "They will all flock to see what the commotion is, and we can charge sixpence a look, a pound if they want a go themselves..."

"I should hate to share you, even for a pound!"

"Oh, we must make it a guinea, then; and we will feed the poor on the proceeds, and the Prime Minister will be so impressed with our enterprise that he will give women the vote, and tear down the workhouses."

"I had no idea it was such a grand thing we were doing."

"The grandest," I said. "Very unselfish of us, really." This last came out unintelligible, through a yawn, but Flo seemed to understand; she quite often understood me when I said nothing, only thought it.

"It will be light soon," she said. "There's so much to be done today; a magic lamp would be a useful thing to have around the place!"

"You would squander your wishes," I said, half asleep. "Feed and clothe the world's poor and keep nothing for yourself."

She leaned over me to blow out the candles. "I would use my last wish," she said, giving me a last kiss before she settled to sleep herself, "to keep everything the way it is now."

Perhaps it was because I was in that peculiar balance between dreams and wakefulness, when magic seemed real and not a mirror-trick worked by stagehands, when genies seemed more than a story told by Diana to keep girls in her bed; but I had a sense, just for a moment, that she had been heard, and answered.

 

 

 


End file.
